• Canadian graphics chip company raises sales, hits profit
• Visiontek signs on with ATI
• MSI, Leadtek to enjoy earlier benefits as first GeForce FX card makers
• Lindows Makes Offline Retail Debut
• Chip Maker Micron Loses $316 Million
• ST claims EPROM family can replace ROMs

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So, you want bragging rights. You have the latest video card, the fastest processor overclocked to blistering speeds complimented with as much ram you can muster to squeeze into the available slots on your motherboard that can do pretty well everything other than take your dog out for a walk. How about your monitor? Is it the everyday CRT? If yes, shame on you!!! What I will be reviewing today is THE largest multifunction TFT LCD on the market. This TFT does everything from DVD's to TV and yes, as a minor point, you can use it as a monitor and a huge one at that.

The Audigy1 came with lots of features, such as 5.1 channel surround sound, Advanced EAX HD, and a mighty impressive software bundle. But, it let us down with its mediocre performance, lack of 24bit recording, and so-so sound reproduction, despite its advertised ‘audiophile’ claims. It came nowhere near its SNR rating on the box. With the introduction of the Audigy2, Creative aims to fix all the wrongs and even bring in some new and interesting features.

Q. Will Creative be developing cards for the forth coming Geforce FX product line? If so what features will the Geforce FX card hold above previous GeForce branded products?

A. The simple answer to this is yes. We are currently evaluating both the regular and ultra versions of GeForceFX and will definitely bring one if not both to market early in the New Year. In fact, and here is a scoop for you, Creative is NVIDIA's sole pan-European launch partner this product. In practice this means that other than some small quantities in specific locations Creative will be the sole source of GeForceFX in the first few weeks.With regard to features I won't go into great detail here since there is already a lot of info out there but I will sum it up by saying that it is the card if you want to run games with everything at max, 4xAA and anisotropic filtering. It will run any game at any resolution with everything on at playable framerates and that applies to forthcoming titles as well as current ones.

In the Summer NVIDIA released their much heralded nForce 2 chipset. Boasting updated features and even some new ones, plus the realisation that Windows XP support, as a mature operating system this time around, would not be a problem made the nForce 2 again look good on paper. It was only until their performance benchmarks started trickling through from review sites that we were to gauge how good the board actually was

Finally, I assembled a test bed and took the Abit AT7 MAX2 motherboard for that, also based on the KT400 chipset. The system started up safely and was running stably. Thanks to its very powerful overclocking options, the Abit AT7 MAX2 motherboard was expected to produce very high results.

The KT400 chipset is now widespread, and many companies have released their KT400 boards in mass quantities. To continue with our slew of KT400 reviews, we've put Gigabyte's GA-7VAXP Ultra board through our test labs and found the board to have some interesting qualities, and some irksome quirks. Overall though, I think you'll find this board to be an interesting alternative to the other KT400 boards!

We all play games, but it’s easy to forget how many mathematics and processing power is involved to actually bring you the ultimate realistic 3D game play experience. That fabulous well-endowed female you just shot while playing your first person shooter is actually nothing more than a collection of vertices, polygons, textures, blending and a bunch of other boring math operations. Most of you undoubtedly have heard that a triangle is the basic building block of 3D graphics, while this holds true for a large part of the graphics pipeline, it’s not exactly true for the part of the pipeline that is being discussed in this article. The basic building block we need is a single, simple, boring (?), point in 3D space.

Thanks to the good folks at Thermaltake, the Overclocker Café’ has a good drawing for you. Between now and January 1, 2003 readers can drop their name in the hat to WIN ONE OF THREE Aquarius II Water Cooling Kits. These units are all in one numbers. Everything you need is in the kit. Folks may enter up to once a day until the day of the drawing. Pretty good way to start the New Year in my book! Remember, there is not one, not two, but THREE chances to win big!

Thermaltake had came out with several new cooling products at the fall Comdex this year in Las Vegas, and one of these products is the TT Aquarius water cooling kit. This water cooler isn't necessarily built for a hardcore overclocker, but rather for a user seeking an efficient and very quiet cooling solution. Today, we will see how the Aquarius II stacks up against the DangerDen cooling kit and we will also balance the differences between the two to see which kit would be best for you.

To the untrained eye choosing a graphics card that's right for your system can be very bewildering, with a CPU you can to some extent compare clock speeds and performance ratings but with a graphics card you are left with a seemingly meaningless set of numbers and technical specifications. Trying to wade through this wealth of information and finding what's relevant can be tricky to the uninitiated and this article is aimed at demystifying what all that jargon on the side of the box actually means.

As you can see in the photo below, fins are not all of the same length and the longer ones have the top slightly bent: Evercool claim that this feature permits to better take advantage from the airflow of the fan.